Beyond Solidarity

Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World

Beyond Solidarity is an impassioned argument for a sharable morality in a world increasingly fractured along lines of difference. Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify. He finds the terms for answering these questions in a more inclusive, cosmopolitan pragmatism—one willing to explore fundamental values without recourse to absolutist arguments. Drawing on the work of William and Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty, and many others, as well as postcolonial writing, Jewish literature of the Holocaust, and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity. Beyond Solidarity, then, is a study of the difference that difference makes in a globalized world.

IntroductionI. Rethinking Solidarity1. Multiculturalism, Mourning, and the Colonial Legacy of the Americas: Towards a New Pragmatics of Cross- and InterculturalCriticism2. Rethinking Human Solidarity in an Age of GlobalismII. Jamesian Matters3. William James and the Globalization of Pragmatism4. Pragmatism and The American SceneIII. Pragmatist Rereadings5. Religion, Rorty, and te Recent Revival of Pragmatism6. Rhetorical Pragmatism and the Question of the Historical7. The Pragmativs of the AestheticIV. Beyond Solidarity8. Beyond SolidarityNotesAcknowledgmentsIndex

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